Shadowrun Returns dev wants to avoid a “Han shot first” situation

The world has changed since Shadowrun was first conceived of, and a lot of the future its creator envisioned has been proved incorrect, but he’s not going to pull a George Lucas and mess with canon fans hold dear.

“The prognostication that I did 25 years ago got some things right and some things really wrong,” Shadowrun creator and Harebrained Games lead Jordan Weisman told Shack News

“Even those wrong things are part of the Shadowrun canon and, for some players and readers, those things still have an emotional resonance to them. So it’s been an interesting process of updating the absolutely minimal possible that we felt would be a suspension-of-disbelief breaker for a new audience. It came down to a handful of little things that we changed and tweaked slightly to avoid that breaking of suspension of disbelief for new players.”

Weisman said messing too much with the franchise would cause a “Han shot first” moment.

“The vast majority has really tried to be respectful to the original vision of the future from 25 years ago,” he said.

“I, like many people, was upset with George [Lucas] for going back and messing with his movies. Then I was working on [Shadowrun Returns], I found myself tempted to go back and fix things that I didn’t like, but I realized, ‘I know what the feels like from a fan’s point-of-view…don’t do that.’ So we restricted ourselves to the barest minimum that wouldn’t disenfranchise new players.”